Book description
Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902,
Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising
career as an academic in Dresden and Göttingen. When, in 1933 Jews
were no longer permitted to teach in German universities, he lost his
job and looked for employment in England. Here, over a long and
amazingly industrious career, he made himself an authority on the
exploration and enjoyment of English art and architecture, so much so
that his magisterial county-by-county series of 46 books on The
Buildings of England (first published 1951 - 74) is usually
referred to simply as 'Pevsner'. As a critic, academic and champion of
Modernism, Pevsner became a central figure in the architectural
consensus that accompanied post-war reconstruction; as a 'general
practitioner' of architectural history, he covered an astonishing
range, from Gothic cathedrals and Georgian coffee houses to the
Festival of Britain and Brutalist tower blocks.
Susie Harries explores the truth about Nikolaus Pevsner's reported
sympathies with elements of Nazi ideology, his internment in England
as an enemy alien and his sometimes painful assimilation into his
country of exile. His Heftchen - secret diaries he kept from
the age of 14 for another sixty years - reveal hidden aspirations and
anxieties, as do his numerous letters (he wrote to his wife, Lola,
every day that they were apart).Harries is the first biographer to
have read Pevsner's private papers and, through them, to have seen
into the workings of his mind. Her definitive biography is not only
rich in context and far-ranging, but is also brought to life by
quotations from Pevsner himself.
He was born a Jew but converted to Lutheranism; trained in the
rigour of German scholarship, he became an Everyman in his copious
commissions, publications, broadcasts and lectures on art,
architecture, design, education, town planning, social housing,
conservation, Mannerism, the Bauhaus, the Victorians,
Zeitgeist, Englishness and how a nation's character may, or
must, be reflected in its art. His life - as an outsider yet an
insider at the heart of English art history - illuminates both the
predicament and the prowess of the continental émigrés who did so
much to shape British culture after 1945.
Susie Harries is a writer specializing in culture, history and the
arts. Born in 1951 in London, where she now lives with her husband
Meirion and their two sons, she read classics and classical philosophy
at Newnham College, Cambridge, and St Anne's College, Oxford. She has
co-authored seven books with her husband, including major works on
twentieth-century arts:
The Academy of St Martin in the Fields
(1981),
The War Artists
(1983) and
A Pilgrim Soul: a Life of Elisabeth Lutyens
(1989).She has also written for the
Independent
and reviewed books on the arts for
The
Times Literary Supplement.
